How Did I Get Here: a Spiritual Autobiography

by Suzanne Woolston

"God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night. These are the words we dimly hear: You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me." —Rainer Marie Rilke, "Book of Hours"

Towards the end of 1996, a miracle happened.

I woke up from a most peculiar slumber. I looked around at my life and realized that I couldn't feel my soul anymore, that the career ladder I was climbing up and up was actually a hamster wheel. The circuitous motion of that wheel had exhausted me to the point of being dangerously, "comfortably" numb (to quote a Pink Floyd song). I did not feel dissatisfaction with my hard-fought position as Vice President and Partner of a $20 million dollar Boston company, as much as . . . bewilderment. The long and winding road indeed had a pot of gold at the end—as I had fortunately discovered—but what did that have to do with anything? My Yuppie paychecks were mere scraps of paper. The ink on the checks spoke of numbers, the number of greenbacks allotted to me in direct proportion to the number of hours of my life I had blindly surrendered, never to return. On paydays I would walk in my business suit to the bank, heels echoing on hollow downtown sidewalks, to deposit and withdraw pieces of paper. But then what? What did "buying things" have to do with happiness? I remember trying to enjoy shopping that Fall, wandering through glit-tering malls, listlessly staring at mannequins, feeling a kin-ship with their plastic immobility. I was utterly adrift and I knew it. The sharpest sensation to pierce my numbness was a vague dismay that I no longer knew why I was alive.

I quit my job within the year, dissolving my partnership for tens of thousands less than it was worth, knowing only that I had to hurry and get off the wheel at any cost. The pilot light of my soul was flickering alarmingly, and I was chilled to the bone to know how close it was to sputtering out. I'd gone off the rails but at least knew it. There was only one place to go: back to the Garden. Back to God.

In my admission applications to Divinity schools, I stated that my decision to enter seminary felt like a natural evolution within a lifelong spiritual context. I wrote:

Just as all rivers flow to the sea, so too has my life flowed inexorably towards God, despite a myriad of riverbends and logjams and whitewater. Indeed, in light of my present successful career in the Boston business world, there are those who view this proposed career change at age 37 as more of a roaring waterfall, a precarious and foolhardy drop over an unknown edge. Yet the pull of the current is such that I feel no ambiguity. My entrance into seminary fulfills a destiny created long ago. God's call resounds in my mind, drowning out all else. I am surprised only that I have swum against the tide for this long.

Although my turning towards seminary felt familiar and indeed fated, I nonetheless cannot deny that I took the long way getting there. The disruption of motion towards God's plan for my life can be traced back, as I will illustrate, to a very clear dissonance: I was raised a Southern Baptist, yet I am gay. Conflict between the two has created a life lived along a volatile fault line.

Outside of the ivory tower of reason, I feel my biological predisposition towards homosexuality is an issue merely because others have made it such. My concern therefore centers solely on the ways environment impacts me in my relationship with God. That I am gay matters less than the reality that I am marginalized. My agenda encompasses the "gay thing" only in that I am careful to prevent, whenever possible, hatred and prejudice to be formed against me and my walk with the Lord. Similarly my concern as a future pastor lies not with pursuing gay rights as such, but rather, with the bigger picture of why humankind feels compelled to throw up barriers between creation and Creator. These barriers are attached to many targets beyond sexual orientation; they result from ego, fear, pride, and the false existential exercise of control.

In my mind there is no greater sin than sitting in judgment against a fellow human, especially when the bias in large or small ways pulls another human away from God. Human interrelatedness forms a "horizontal" dimension, which crosses with our "vertical" worship of the Trinity. In that way the cross can be seen as a symbol of Life, as it is formed by two planes: our relationship with God crisscrossed by our relationship with our planet mates. Horizontal and Vertical intersect in the soul—both are bound together irrevocably in the heart. Not surprisingly, each has powerful influences on the other. Hence my desire to be a theologian. Hence my desire to be a pastor. Hence my desire to see prejudice and judgmentalness end.

Accordingly, I'm keenly interested in the constructs of power in Christianity, i.e. the human manifestation of God's mandates which have led to the oppression of so many citizens of the Kingdom. What variables impacted the formation of the Canon in such a way so as to give rise to the resultant patriarchal power structure which has so obviously fostered misogyny, homophobia, and racism in the Church? Why is "religion" so often used as a weapon for control? I shall pursue a synthesis of two disparate disciplines: start with sociological theory (i.e. "herd mentality" and the apparently primal resistance to diversity within a socio-population, as one example) and place those theories in their natural unfolding of the life of the Church. Examining core sociological patterns is pertinent to theology in many profound, organic ways. Human are `only human', after all, and certain behavioral biases were and are unavoidable in church leaders, save Christ himself. Yet, to question the `infallibility' of the scriptures because of human biases has long been considered heretical. And thus how many souls have been lost to God because they were deemed "unfit" for Christianity? How many voices of powerful potential ministers have been silenced because they were born the `wrong' gender? The wrong race? The wrong creed? It is astounding to think that throughout history body issues (gender, skin color, sexual orientation) have been used to block the development of the spirit of many. The hatred and rejection exhibited by Christianity towards those who are different resembles a kind of spiritual genocide, generation after generation. A new kind of liberation theology is needed. The recent realization of the abuse of civil rights in our society has thrown most American denominations into quite a current quandary. Schisms threaten.

I thank God for the sudden dawning of the UCC denomination in my life. As a Southerner, I had never been exposed to congregationalism until very recently. I embrace the emphasis on grace exhibited by the UCC denomination in general, and Jim and Lael's ministerial presence at OSC in particular. This denomination's congregational polity is, I believe, the only answer for post-modern Christianity in a pluralistic society.

Yes, God calls.

At last, I answer. And I am released from the wheel, numb no more. +

Suzanne Woolston, a first year Master of Divinity student at Boston University, joined Old South in September 1998 and was received by the Board of Deacons in January to be a seminarian "in care" seeking ordination in the Metropolitan Boston Association. She is also serving as Chaplain Associate as BU's Marsh Chapel and is giving her first sermon at its Easter Sunrise service. Suzanne and her partner Ellen, who also joined OSC in September, reside in Jamaica Plain.